There’s a new Drobo out! 
The Drobo range has been expanded with the release of the DroboPro, an 8-drive big brother to the Drobo “classic”. The new model is being touted as a “business class storage array” and looks very interesting for the basic price tag of $1299 without drives.
Specifications
So, the DroboPro has capacity for up to eight 3.5″ SATA drives. With spinning rust boxes now at 2TB a drive, that’s up to 16TB of raw capacity. Clearly that amount of storage is probably way too much for a single PC and that’s where the “business” part comes in. The DroboPro supports iSCSI (through a single gigabit connection), raising the stakes by moving it into the multiple server league. It can also be rack mounted, although that does look a little weird.
There are limitations however as the DroboPro supports a maximum of 16x 16TB drives – but they are thin provisioned.
Wish List
My comments are only based on what I’ve read on the Drobo website, however I am an existing Drobo owner. I have both the Drobo “classic” and the DroboShelf (oops, sorry DroboShare). The classic is great, just running and running, however the DroboShare was a disappointment and I don’t use it for anything other than a rest for the Drobo. I’d like to evaluate the ‘Pro, however in the meantime, here’s my wish list of features:
- DroboMini – please do a Drobo which accepts 2.5″ drives – preferably both SATA and SAS.
- Partitioning – with multiple drive type support, provide multiple pools – tiering in a box.
- Multiple Ethernet – more than one Ethernet port would be good!
- Snapshots – point in time copies of LUNs
- Replication – OK perhaps I’m going a bit far…
I think it’s worth recapping what the DroboPro offers; secure scalable storage – iSCSI out of the box – thin provisioning. Bring it on!
